Both/And

I have a confession.

I laughed out loud last Tuesday.

Really laughed. The kind that sneaks up on you and arrives without permission and is frankly a little undignified.

And for approximately four seconds afterward, I felt guilty about it.

Because Tuesday was also the day I had read three devastating headlines before 8 a.m. Because people are suffering. Because the world is on fire — sometimes literally — and here I was, laughing at something stupid and small and entirely inconsequential.

What kind of person does that?

This kind.

The human kind.

And I want to talk about that today. Because I think a lot of us are quietly punishing ourselves for the same thing — for having the audacity to feel good in the middle of feeling bad. For experiencing joy while simultaneously holding grief. For being alive in the full, complicated, contradictory sense of the word while the news does its level best to flatten us into a single emotion.

We have been sold a story about feelings.

The story goes like this: you pick one. You feel it thoroughly. You resolve it. You move on.

Grief or gratitude. Rage or peace. Despair or hope.

Choose your lane.

This is, of course, complete nonsense.

Human beings do not work that way. We never have. We are not built for emotional single-file lines. We are built for the entire messy, overlapping, occasionally absurd experience of being alive all at once.

You can be heartbroken about the state of democracy and also delighted by your morning coffee.

You can be furious about injustice and also moved to tears by a piece of music that has nothing to do with anything.

You can be exhausted by the world and also, inexplicably, kind of excited about something small and personal and entirely yours.

Both.

And.

Not one or the other. Not one after the other. Both. Simultaneously. Without one canceling out the other.

This is not cognitive dissonance.

This is being human in full.

And here’s why this matters beyond just giving yourself permission to laugh on a hard Tuesday:

The both/and is where resilience actually lives.

Not in the relentless pursuit of positive thinking — which, let’s be honest, is just toxic positivity in a motivational poster. Not in the wallowing either. Not in the kind of despair that becomes its own comfortable identity.

But in the ability to hold contradiction without collapsing.

To say: this is terrible AND I am still here.

To say: I am grieving AND I am grateful.

To say: the world is breaking my heart AND I refuse to stop loving it.

That is not weakness.

That is not avoidance.

That is the most courageous, most honest, most sustainable way I know to stay engaged with a world that will absolutely break you if you let it become the only thing you feel.

Joy is not a betrayal of the moment.

I’ve said this before and I will keep saying it until it lands.

Your joy — even now, especially now — is an act of resistance. It is proof that you have not been fully consumed. That something in you remains unreachable by the headlines. That life, your actual irreplaceable life, is still happening inside all of this noise.

So laugh when something is funny.

Cry when something is sad.

Do both in the same afternoon if that’s what Tuesday requires.

You are not being inconsistent.

You are being alive.

And alive — complicated, contradictory, Both/And alive —

is exactly what the world needs you to be.

Julie Bolejack,
The Mindful Activist

🎲 Bonus: Random Info You Didn’t Know You Needed

Jazz was once considered a serious threat to civilization.

In the 1920s, concerned citizens, clergy, and medical professionals — actual doctors with actual degrees — declared jazz music dangerous to public health and moral character. The Ladies Home Journal published an article in 1921 titled “Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?” The answer, according to the author, was essentially yes, absolutely, lock up your daughters.

Music teachers warned it would destroy young people’s ability to appreciate real music.

Cities attempted to ban it.

It did not work.

Jazz survived. Thrived. Became one of America’s most celebrated cultural contributions to the world.

The people who loved it kept loving it anyway — through the outrage, through the pearl-clutching, through the very serious warnings that joy of that particular variety was simply too much.

Sometimes the things that feel like too much are exactly right.

Both/And.